The Difference Between Success And Failure Is Going Digital

“We looked at two companies in the same
industry–insurance–delivering roughly the same sort of
product lines. It was people using a direct salesforce to
sell into home insurance and risk insurance and so on. They
had come to exactly the same conclusion from a leadership
perspective. The two leaders that we spoke to had decided
that they needed to really equip the front-end people, the
salesforce, with digital tools so they could be much
more effective when they are actually selling products on the
client side.

So, it was the same kind of strategy at this level. But they
came at it in completely different ways. One of the guys, one
of the leaders invested in equipping his salesforce with
technology, he was basically giving them tablets and
smartphones, and all this kind of stuff where they added
product catalogs, pricing range, it was loads of information
being loaded on these platforms. But pretty much none of the
processes changed within the rest of the organization.

The second company did something completely different. They
virtually zero based their processes saying, ok, what can we
do with the technology we have today? And they ended up with
the same answer, equipping the sales guys with an iPad, but the process behind it was
completely different. They loaded credit ratings directly to
the iPad, they looked at pricing algorithms run from the iPad
and connected back to the front office, and it went right
down to electronic signatures and electronic printing on
site.

The first company was able to raise their productivity by a
couple of percentage points. The other one raised not only
productivity tremendously, but also the sales levels because
they automated entirely, they used the power of their
technology to change the entire process.

The best way I can express it is it was the
difference between sticking a technology in an existing
process, substitution if you will, versus really transforming
the process with the power of what the technology can do. And
the gains were an order of magnitude different."